Commercial Real Estate Brokers – Assert Yourself with Confidence to Win More New Business

In most commercial real estate markets there will be plenty of competition when it comes to attracting fresh listings and new business opportunity. Other agents will be pitching for the same listings at the same time. So there are some things few to do and consider.

To improve personal performance it is necessary to assert yourself in the marketing sense as the property specialist that your clients need. The degree of confidence and skills that come with that process will help to make you stand out as the agent of choice.

Clients today need comprehensive services provided by the best agent for the property type and the location. The best agents always attract the listings. The marketing of commercial real estate today is not an experiment, but rather a very specific process of target marketing. 

Some would say that you need to be a ‘real fighter’ when it comes to winning listings and presentations. Perhaps the word ‘fighter’ is too severe, and should be replaced with the words like stamina, confidence, resilience, persistence, and consistency. When you apply property knowledge and specialization to those five factors I have just mentioned, personal performance becomes a real fact and business tool.

Develop Personal Performance

Here below are some ways that you can develop personal performance in commercial real estate and assert yourself as a top agent in any property market, no matter what property type you work on.

Compare these strategies to your current activities. Look for the ways in which you can improve your new business and prospecting activities:

1. Design excellent advertising copy. Make all of your listings stand out with the finest advertising copy that is carefully written and crafted. Most of the agent created real estate advertising today is poorly written. The adverts are generically written without appropriate understanding or regard for the correct keywords, words that sell, factors of attraction particular for the property, and attractive layout based on the target market. Many adverts today could have been created by a 10-year-old. When you convert a listing exclusively, that is then the reason to spend a reasonable amount of time on advertising copy and a definite marketing strategy. There are plenty of books available to help you write advertising copy. That single strategy will help you attract more inbound enquiries from the marketing undertaken both online and off-line to your listings.
2. Build your database at every opportunity. Talk to new people every day so that you database can grow with meaningful fresh contacts. At a personal level your database is perhaps the most important business tool you can develop and use in the industry. There are plenty of people to talk to in the property market each and every day. To keep your prospecting processes on track and growing, there is a real advantage in using a database and not just a spreadsheet or typed list. Spreadsheets and lists do not provide the versatility and the search facilities to control lots of contacts. Choose the correct database program that you can afford, making sure that the software provide you with the appropriate levels of data entry and control. Cloud based software today is the preferred option when it comes to establishing and protecting database entries.
3. Ask for referrals with the right people at the right time. One successful transaction can lead to many other contacts and opportunities. The people you serve in sales, leasing, or property management can lead you into other relationships with further clients and business identities. Ask for referrals of the right time. It is always easier to grow business from a referral than it is to prospect generally and cold call.
4. Market your listings with vendor paid marketing funds. Most top agents will ask for exclusivity as part of the listing process; the property presentation or the sales pitch undertaken will always incorporate exclusivity as an essential factor of property promotion. Depending on the property type and the market, it is quite normal and essential to ask for a level of marketing funds equating to approximately 1% of the potential sale price. In the case of the leasing appointment, the volume of marketing funds requested from the landlord should equate to approximately 5% of the annual rent.
5. Establish a system of personal prospecting that you can implement every day. When you get busy with listings and clients, it is very easy to overlook the requirement for prospecting for listings. Over a period of a few months, the result will be a loss of market share and a lessening of commissions. If you want to achieve results as a commercial real estate agent, prospecting can never be postponed or deferred. Devote at least to 3 hours every day to the prospecting process.
6. Track and measure the time on market for all listings locally. When you have a few listings to work on, you can track the level of enquiry and the time on market for each listing. You will then see how things are changing with sales and leasing activity. You will also understand what people are looking for when purchasing and when leasing. Monitoring your listings will allow you to make adjustments where necessary when it comes to marketing, inspections, and negotiating.

So there are many things to be done here when it comes to asserting yourself as the top agent that you should be in your location. Always remember that the industry is actually based around personal contact and personal effort. The top agents of the market control both of those things at a personal level. That is exactly how they find the listings for other agents.